Yaakov Kimelfeld, PhD

Digital modes of video delivery to the audiences bring individual addressability, allowing advertisers to reach exclusive target audience segments. Not the abstract Nielsen’s “Females 25–34” anymore — but expectant mothers, first-time home buyers, life insurance shoppers, foreign-made car buyers, etc., pinpointed with the help of various analytic and research instruments such as IRI, Shopcom, and Polk. And that is not the limit; connecting CRM databases with streaming services registration… Show more

Digital modes of video delivery to the audiences bring individual addressability, allowing advertisers to reach exclusive target audience segments. Not the abstract Nielsen’s “Females 25–34” anymore — but expectant mothers, first-time home buyers, life insurance shoppers, foreign-made car buyers, etc., pinpointed with the help of various analytic and research instruments such as IRI, Shopcom, and Polk. And that is not the limit; connecting CRM databases with streaming services registration databases allows a relevant ad to be served exclusively to the advertiser’s very own existing customers and prospects. Think Facebook Custom Audiences level of targeting. What, until now, was only possible on PCs, tablets, and smartphones is finally coming to the largest glowing rectangle in the room.

The bad news is that the upfronts were never intended for selling or buying granular audiences. Nielsen ratings, the traditional currency of TV networks and advertisers buying in advance, are invented to measure mass tune-in scenarios: how many people watch the same program at the same time. When the viewing is fragmented and on demand, the model breaks.

There are talks about new currency that would replace Nielsen numbers — potentially powered by more granular viewership data through Rentrak or comScore, matched with various other third-party sources. But the real solution for the TV companies is to give advertisers flexibility to use all data at their disposal to define custom audiences — and then negotiate guarantees against reaching those audiences in advance. That will be a different model altogether, but there is no return to the golden standard of Nielsen ratings. In order to advertise effectively on the new TV, each advertiser will have to create their own internal currency informed by the unique economies of their specific products and brands.
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An approach to integrate marketing mix modeling with multi-touch attribution/path-to-purchase analysis using aggregated media data along with person-level data from behavioral and transactional industry panels.

The ratings-points approach is typically detrimental to an online campaign's efficacy. Focusing just on reach and frequency limits a digital campaign's ability to serve ads based on specific audience characteristics other than demographics, such as interactions with the ad, sharing and passing along content, and other online behaviors and transactions.
GRPs certainly have a place as a cross-media campaign metric, but they are unlikely to take root as the universal online currency.
What… Show more

The ratings-points approach is typically detrimental to an online campaign's efficacy. Focusing just on reach and frequency limits a digital campaign's ability to serve ads based on specific audience characteristics other than demographics, such as interactions with the ad, sharing and passing along content, and other online behaviors and transactions.
GRPs certainly have a place as a cross-media campaign metric, but they are unlikely to take root as the universal online currency.
What then would be the currency?
It’s not a given that online needs one. With the wealth of data on exchanges, well-designed online campaigns thrive in the absence of currency. Advertisers have learned to apply behavioral tools to fish the muddy waters beyond the premium placements, where the cost of media is defined not by number of eyeballs but by supply and demand. As a result, they discover the untapped potential customers more efficiently. In effect, the US currency becomes the media currency.
Under these circumstances, the best strategy for advertisers would be to assess the relative roles of all available measurements and to create their own internal currencies informed by the unique economies of their specific products and brands.
For example, direct retailers should concentrate on media-attributable visitor traffic, conversions by product type and revenues. CPG advertisers should monitor search behavior, attitudinal response to ads, consumer interactions with their brands' online entities and ads, pass-along behavior, word-of-mouth, and online sentiment. At the same time, they should match media exposure to purchase behavior (as measured by offline panels or databases) to assess the impact of advertising on sales. For most advertisers, evaluating media investments in the digital world requires working with a number of measurement and tracking vendors and developing proprietary systems to electronically monitor consumer media and purchase behavior. Show less

Digital media presents an opportunity for advertisers to reach consumers anywhere and at any time, ultimately affecting the likelihood of consumer engagement. Even still, quantitative measurement of campaign effectiveness can be challenging characterized by lack of accurate metrics.
Critical decisions regarding the effectiveness and ROI of online campaigns are made based on the simplistic metrics that attribute the conversion entirely to the measured campaign. Traditional approaches often… Show more

Digital media presents an opportunity for advertisers to reach consumers anywhere and at any time, ultimately affecting the likelihood of consumer engagement. Even still, quantitative measurement of campaign effectiveness can be challenging characterized by lack of accurate metrics.
Critical decisions regarding the effectiveness and ROI of online campaigns are made based on the simplistic metrics that attribute the conversion entirely to the measured campaign. Traditional approaches often miss three key issues – the impact of all pre and post ad viewing events (brand interactions - e.g. social, video, search, reviews, etc.) on the consumer conversion. The second is the user intent. Often campaigns are viewed by consumers who would convert regardless. The third aspect is the online user behavior. Online behavioral patterns specific to the user are critical in understanding the frequency requirements for brand interactions that result in maximum positive impact and conversion.
We present an approach that uses longitudinal user level panel data to measure the chronology of various ad events and brand interactions experienced by the user. We apply unsupervised learning models to detect patterns of baseline behavior. Integrating this knowledge with online consumer behavior we create behavioral segments based on the purchasing patterns of consumers. An influence metric estimates the impact of campaigns in the consumer purchase decision for each of the segments. We present results using an online ad campaign in the wireless industry that contrasts the influence of the campaign using traditional effectiveness measures and the estimates using the methodology described above. The conclusion using our methodology indicates a much more effective digital campaign in targeted populations than indicated by traditional methods. Show less

At the end of this year the industry will begin transitioning from a served to a viewable impression standard. Advertisers will finally stop paying for ads that have no chance of being seen by the consumers -- that is, those ads that are below the fold or that are skipped too quickly.
This is a true paradigm shift for an industry that since its early days has relied on direct marketing metrics for optimization, trading impressions as a questionable commodity. Presumably, after the transition… Show more

At the end of this year the industry will begin transitioning from a served to a viewable impression standard. Advertisers will finally stop paying for ads that have no chance of being seen by the consumers -- that is, those ads that are below the fold or that are skipped too quickly.
This is a true paradigm shift for an industry that since its early days has relied on direct marketing metrics for optimization, trading impressions as a questionable commodity. Presumably, after the transition is over, an ad impression will evolve from being a mechanical event -- the creative file being loaded on the Web page -- to an "opportunity to see" event: something of inherent value to a brand, just as in traditional media.

The current IAB definition of viewability -- at least half of pixels that fall within the visible area of the browser be viewed for at least one second -- will, most certainly, become an industry standard for display. The discussion is still raging about streaming video, however, and it is very likely that the industry will follow Google's TrueView self-imposed standard of five-seconds-in-view play.
Feeling too comfortable? Brace for impact. The shift will be challenging, to put it mildly.
According to estimates from varying sources, 30% to 50% of measurable display ads currently served are below the IAB viewability standard. The averages do not tell a good story in this case, because the variances are also very high, with some campaigns' viewability being as low as 8%, even on desirable sites.
It is clear, however, that once the invisible ads cease or become free, the CPM rates for the remaining viewable inventory will jump in compliance to hard market laws. That will shake publishers, advertisers and agencies alike, necessitating changes in budget allocations, new pricing models and new technologies/partnerships to monitor viewability. According to the most extreme scenarios, online CPMs for viewable ads could well exceed those of TV. Show less

If your day job involves creating, defending or presenting a media plan featuring seven or eight digits in the bottom right cell, chances are you truly believe in branding. And you live in a strange, strange world.
Direct response campaigns bring in new customers, move the inventory and are held accountable to hard business KPIs. Branding is about creating awareness, perceptions and attitudes. Direct response results are evident from campaign data itself. However, figuring out the impact of… Show more

If your day job involves creating, defending or presenting a media plan featuring seven or eight digits in the bottom right cell, chances are you truly believe in branding. And you live in a strange, strange world.
Direct response campaigns bring in new customers, move the inventory and are held accountable to hard business KPIs. Branding is about creating awareness, perceptions and attitudes. Direct response results are evident from campaign data itself. However, figuring out the impact of a multimillion-dollar branding campaign can require custom research done by a bunch of Ph.Ds. If this was YOUR money, where would you rather put it?
Counterintuitively, close to 90% of all media spend is in branding - and 84% of branding budgets are spent via traditional channels (Kantar Media Intelligence, January through April 2013). Although televisions are just one of the several glowing rectangles consumers use on a daily basis, it is still the main branding medium.
However, television commercials struggle to draw viewers' attention away from their mobile devices. For many advertisers, online and mobile still squarely equate to "direct." But any digital ad worth its pixels challenges this traditional dichotomy. A flashy video ad for a new coupe concurrently raises brand awareness, prompts consideration and requires only a few clicks to schedule a test drive. In digital media, branding and direct response converge. Show less

Attribution modeling or path-to-purchase analysis? These concepts are often used in the same context -- and, at times, are confused with one another. The purpose of both is to establish optimal touchpoints for consumer interaction with the brand and to optimize individual online channels to achieve the best cost savings and customer experience. So, what is the difference between the two?
Attribution is ad-centric. That is, the unit of analysis used is an ad placement.
Marketers use the… Show more

Attribution modeling or path-to-purchase analysis? These concepts are often used in the same context -- and, at times, are confused with one another. The purpose of both is to establish optimal touchpoints for consumer interaction with the brand and to optimize individual online channels to achieve the best cost savings and customer experience. So, what is the difference between the two?
Attribution is ad-centric. That is, the unit of analysis used is an ad placement.
Marketers use the data generated from tagging these placements to understand the degree of influence each ad has on the consumer. The main outcome of an attribution analysis is apportioning of the credit for each conversion among the ads. In other words, they look to analyze a consumer that was exposed to an ad prior to converting and then used that information to change strategies accordingly by re-allocating media spend to the ads that had the greatest impact.
Path to Purchase analysis is consumer-centric. The unit of analysis here is an individual consumer.
This analysis concentrates on the sequence and intensity of each relevant behavior that may eventually impact a consumer’s decision. Exposure to an ad or a click on a paid search ad are all accounted for, but so are the visits to a competitor's site, a review site, the use of a search engine on an aggregator site, seeing a product placement in a YouTube video, etc. The approach is exploratory - no prior assumptions are made about consumers' behaviors. The clustering algorithms applied to the multitudes of individual paths establish how many distinctive behavioral patterns exist in the mix.
Attribution management, at its basic level, could be almost real-time, with the results of users' exposure/interactions with ads being immediately processed, weighted, translated into algorithms and fed into media optimization engines. This is a giant leap forward from the traditional "last click or view wins" mentality. Show less

There is one diagram that any marketer would be capable of sketching from memory, even after being awakened from the depths of an REM sleep cycle. It is a trapezoid with a shorter lower base -- or, perhaps, an overturned truncated cone --featuring several rows of words such as "awareness," "consideration," "engagement,” “product discovery," "purchase" and "loyalty" placed within.
Recognize it? Yes, it is the good old purchase funnel.
For some marketers, this is all they remember from… Show more

There is one diagram that any marketer would be capable of sketching from memory, even after being awakened from the depths of an REM sleep cycle. It is a trapezoid with a shorter lower base -- or, perhaps, an overturned truncated cone --featuring several rows of words such as "awareness," "consideration," "engagement,” “product discovery," "purchase" and "loyalty" placed within.
Recognize it? Yes, it is the good old purchase funnel.
For some marketers, this is all they remember from their MBA courses. But the industry has collectively concluded that the traditional purchase funnel is dead. Several obituaries have already been posted in the trade media -- including on these very pages.
The explosion of digital channels and the always-on media ecosystem, coupled with the emergence of an increasingly discerning consumer, are usually identified as the culprits in the funnel's untimely demise.
In fact, McKinsey & Co., a consultancy, recently came up with an alternative to the purchase funnel. Called Consumer Decision Journey, this model was derived from an analysis of data collected by traditional means -- interviews and surveys.
McKinsey depicts consumer decision-making as a cyclical loop with four phases representing potential "battlegrounds” where marketers could win or lose: “initial consideration,” “the process of researching,” “the actual conversion,” and “post-purchase.”
An alternative way of dealing with this clickstream chaos is to start from the lowest common denominator --an individual consumer path to purchase -- and build from the bottom up.
Granted, each individual path is different -- both the actual activities and their timing and sequence vary widely between consumers. But the combinations are not infinite. A deep hard look into the data trail that consumers leave behind and a meaningful summarization can and should be attempted by any company who is interested in how their consumers really arrive to the purchase decision. Show less

“The future is here. It’s just not widely distributed yet.”
Normally, this William Gibson quote is apropos for any crystal ball gazing type of exercise. Not this time, though.
That’s because the future of advertising is already here and has been widely distributed. It is just not widely recognized as advertising yet.

The fuzzy clustering approach to path-to-purchase analysis allows to segment the myriads of possible paths to identify the optimal ones, those that shorten and ease consumer journey to purchase.
Concentration on these paths allowed our clients to revise their marketing strategies, making them both more effective and efficient.

Madison Avenue today is a study in contrast. The media ecosystem has become so complicated that, just to get a general idea of what is happening in digital, social, set-top and mobile requires supercomputers parsing Big Data terabytes.
Yet for many Mad Ave residents, advertising is still a simple two-way street. They see it as a message that travels from advertiser to consumer via a publisher. Some consumers respond to the message and move toward the advertiser along the classic… Show more

Madison Avenue today is a study in contrast. The media ecosystem has become so complicated that, just to get a general idea of what is happening in digital, social, set-top and mobile requires supercomputers parsing Big Data terabytes.
Yet for many Mad Ave residents, advertising is still a simple two-way street. They see it as a message that travels from advertiser to consumer via a publisher. Some consumers respond to the message and move toward the advertiser along the classic path-to-purchase funnel, while others don't. Success is attributed either to the quality of the message or to its ability to reach more eyeballs and break through the clutter of other advertisers' messages traveling along the same busy street.
Many hope that a single metric media currency can one day emerge to simplify the unwelcome complexity of new media.
What agencies really need, however, is not a new currency but a new set of glasses.
The reality is that the theoretical two-way street that for many represented advertising never really existed. Today, advertising practitioners are finding themselves on a complex network of intertwined country routes, highways, overpasses, roundabouts and tunnels where they are but one of millions of other drivers. And more alarmingly, when it comes to brands and products, they are not even the ones holding the wheel. Their control over their own messages and distribution is diminishing.
What is the use, then, in having a currency, when fewer and fewer of the most lucrative placements can be bought at a discount, or at all? New technology has empowered consumers to manipulate media, and as a result, advertising content gets picked up and passed along, becoming altered and redistributed along the way until it is far removed from its original placement.
With consumers slicing and dicing though content, modifying and disseminating it as they go along, each consumer sees or creates a somewhat different picture anyway. Show less

There's an old joke about a man searching for his car keys at night under a streetlight instead of around the car where his keys were ostensibly lost. When asked by a passerby why he was searching there he replies, “Because the light is better under the streetlight!"
When it comes to searching for insight into the consumer decision-making process, most of what we know is due to research methods that originate from social sciences. We rely on these methods to select a representative sample of… Show more

There's an old joke about a man searching for his car keys at night under a streetlight instead of around the car where his keys were ostensibly lost. When asked by a passerby why he was searching there he replies, “Because the light is better under the streetlight!"
When it comes to searching for insight into the consumer decision-making process, most of what we know is due to research methods that originate from social sciences. We rely on these methods to select a representative sample of consumers to study, to design experimental tests for campaigns and to compensate for gaps in data with statistical inference techniques.
But there is an alternative to dealing with samples and the limitations they carry -- namely the uncertainty as to whether research insights actually correspond to the real world.
With data sets increasing exponentially -- and with significant investments being made to create new platforms or Big Data tools to contain and make sense of this data -- it becomes easy to believe that the answers to all possible marketing effectiveness questions lie somewhere among those petabytes.
Collecting infinite data pertaining to the marketing ecosystem would require an infinite investment. So it is only natural for a corporation to default into thinking about itself as a universe, and simply collect all the data to which it has access: for example, all purchase activities customers of company A, all behaviors on the site B, all searches at the search engine C., etc. The resulting Big Data would include all possible performance indicators, but the factors driving them would still remain outside of the framework in someone else's Big -- or not so big -- data set. Show less

To paraphrase the tagline used in commercials by Ally Bank: "Even children know it takes more than a single ad to convert a prospect."
When optimizing online campaigns, the overwhelming majority of advertisers still credit only the last ad event that occurred prior to the conversion. That last event is typically in the form of exposure to a display banner or a click on a paid search link. This is usually referred to as the ‘last ad’ model. Some advertisers will only attribute credit to an… Show more

To paraphrase the tagline used in commercials by Ally Bank: "Even children know it takes more than a single ad to convert a prospect."
When optimizing online campaigns, the overwhelming majority of advertisers still credit only the last ad event that occurred prior to the conversion. That last event is typically in the form of exposure to a display banner or a click on a paid search link. This is usually referred to as the ‘last ad’ model. Some advertisers will only attribute credit to an ad if it was clicked – the ‘last click’ model.
It’s no wonder, then, that every third post on this blog seems to be about "attribution."
For those who have spent the last several years living under a rock, when media practitioners say "attribution" or "multi-touch attribution" they are usually apportioning credit for each conversion measured across all advertising a consumer was exposed to prior to converting. That seems like the obvious way things should be done, but it is a giant leap forward from the traditional approach still commonly used today.
Indeed, in recent years we have seen a sharp increase in usage of attribution management as advertisers look to extract maximum value from their digital budget. Multiple players and methodologies compete for the best way to attribute conversion to the ad/media that drove it. The field is data and method heavy with companies usually boasting about the superiority of their statistical techniques or the visual allure of their dashboards as key service differentiators. In some instances, advertisers conduct their own analysis with campaign data available from third party servers such as Atlas and Doubleclick.
There is, however, a major challenge to the explanatory value of attribution analyses as currently performed. And it is not in using logistic regression instead of Bayesian networks. Show less

The uncertainty about the future of Facebook has a lot to do with the uncertainty about its metrics. If “social” -- the mentions of brands and recommendations from friends and companies -- is indeed the future of the online advertising business, it is about time we come up with media-like standard metrics to plan and evaluate social advertising.
Although there’s no shortage of measurement companies in social media, such standards are yet to emerge. The increased curiosity of marketers… Show more

The uncertainty about the future of Facebook has a lot to do with the uncertainty about its metrics. If “social” -- the mentions of brands and recommendations from friends and companies -- is indeed the future of the online advertising business, it is about time we come up with media-like standard metrics to plan and evaluate social advertising.
Although there’s no shortage of measurement companies in social media, such standards are yet to emerge. The increased curiosity of marketers about social networking gave birth to hundreds of "listening" research vendors that perfected the art of monitoring discussion volumes and delivering dashboards centered on posts and mentions of specific issues or brands. The number of times a brand or company is mentioned in blogs, on Facebook or Twitter is generally of interest to advertisers, especially when supplemented with sophisticated sentiment analysis that discerns positive brand mentions from the negative.
Alas, this number cannot be used for planning, buying and optimizing campaigns. It’s time to stop merely counting the posts and bring in the social media impression. The industry is ripe, and all that’s needed is to connect listening tools with metered panel data. While a listening platform records a single post on your brand, that mention is actually read/seen by X number of people. That number is the count of social impressions for that post. Calculating this for all brand mentions will give an idea of the total social impressions recorded for your brand, which we can compare to the volume of paid impressions. By matching that data to the panel for de-duplication, demographics and psychographics, the social media data can complement the campaign opportunity-to-see measures with "social media GRPs." Show less

The most recent ARF Audience Measurement conference was titled "The Measurement Crisis." Crisis or not, there were real signs of discord in the industry -- primarily about digital ratings.
Conventional wisdom holds that the main reason why display/video advertising has had trouble increasing its share vs. traditional TV advertising is the lack of comparable measurement across the platforms to allow major advertisers to compare the two. That is, the reason that major brands have been holding… Show more

The most recent ARF Audience Measurement conference was titled "The Measurement Crisis." Crisis or not, there were real signs of discord in the industry -- primarily about digital ratings.
Conventional wisdom holds that the main reason why display/video advertising has had trouble increasing its share vs. traditional TV advertising is the lack of comparable measurement across the platforms to allow major advertisers to compare the two. That is, the reason that major brands have been holding back from moving more dollars into display and video advertising is because of the lack of single currency for TV and online: a media “euro” of sorts.
The industry’s experience with cable TV advertising in the 1970s -1980s is often used to show that if an emerging channel has metrics comparable to an older one, budgets would quickly follow proportionally.
The fallacy of this argument: In this instance, the GRPs were also the main metrics for planning and optimizing cable TV placements -- and remain so until now. Online, however, is not planned or optimized by TV-like metrics. Few panelists could explain why having online GRPs was so important, beyond loosening the strings of the TV purse. Most advertisers ended up saying that GRPs alone were not sufficient, and that they needed deeper funnel metrics: branding, behavioral, and transactional.
So, GRPs are crucial for TV budgets to come online, but become kind of marginal once the check is cashed? That’s not what one wants from a single currency.When it comes to media ratings, things cease to be completely rational; they are still somewhat of an industry sacred cow. The ratings nostalgia is rooted in the simplicity of the times when GRPs/TRPs were, indeed, a media currency, considered by advertisers and publishers alike to be the best available equivalent of audience value to the advertiser. The currency, however, is NOT the value; it only represents value, and only because everyone agrees it does. Show less

How retail marketers can strengthen their online advertising strategies.

Consumer mindset is a key ingredient to advertising receptivity. By understanding how to connect with consumers based on their mindset, marketers can create more meaningful connections with their audiences

Few professionals are as willing to trust their business partners as media practitioners. This quality is especially obvious during industry love fests - also known as upfronts - where billions in media spend are distributed in advance, primarily based on mutual trust between the buyers and the publishers. With all the things that can and do go wrong, it seems hard to believe that after the ink dries on the contract, all TV spots will run during the right programs, every ad will appear exactly… Show more

Few professionals are as willing to trust their business partners as media practitioners. This quality is especially obvious during industry love fests - also known as upfronts - where billions in media spend are distributed in advance, primarily based on mutual trust between the buyers and the publishers. With all the things that can and do go wrong, it seems hard to believe that after the ink dries on the contract, all TV spots will run during the right programs, every ad will appear exactly when and where it belongs, and each message will reach its intended audience.
The advanced targeting and placement alternatives in online advertising today - from roadblocks and frequency capping to precise geographic, demographic and behavior targeting, and to direct audience acquisition through the use of ad networks and exchanges - all rely on a myriad of correct technical executions by publishers and ad networks. Herein lies the unpleasant side effects of digital media: unprecedented opportunities for human error and abuses of trust.
Maybe your ad makes it to the exact audience you wanted, but after running out of U.S. visitors to whom to broadcast your ads, an unscrupulous publisher starts serving impressions to international audiences. Sure, people in Australia can learn about your product, but, even if it is available in Australia, the Sydney (not New York) budget should cover the funds for its promotion in the Land Down Under. Even worse, a non-transparent network might place your ad with the intended consumer demographic, but that might be on a porn site or somewhere equally unsavory.
Avoiding these professional nightmares is the business proposition of several verification companies in the marketplace. DoubleVerify, MediaTrust, AdXpose, AdPepper, AdSafe and Lucid Media are the leading firms offering services designed to minimize uncertainty in online advertising. They do so by creating a transparent view into every ad's lifecycle. Show less

The world of the modern-day traditional agency is under siege. Marketing consultancies, research houses and occasional bold digital media companies infringe on strategic planning, the agencies' once lucrative domain. The periodic emergence of new digital channels slams traditional agencies against mobile, search, in-game, and social media pure-plays, which generally have more advanced technologies and practices in their specific areas. The tried-and-true methods that for decades empowered a… Show more

The world of the modern-day traditional agency is under siege. Marketing consultancies, research houses and occasional bold digital media companies infringe on strategic planning, the agencies' once lucrative domain. The periodic emergence of new digital channels slams traditional agencies against mobile, search, in-game, and social media pure-plays, which generally have more advanced technologies and practices in their specific areas. The tried-and-true methods that for decades empowered a handful of corporate giants to cut through the clutter of several dozens of channels and mass market their messages to passive media voyeurs cannot possibly work in the world of thousands of channels, where entry barriers for new advertisers are extremely low (thanks to Google), where consumers easily avoid ads, and themselves became content creators and distributors.
Agencies of today have to navigate a highly fragmented media environment of ad networks, exchanges and direct publisher relationships. Some industry pundits predict that the world of media will become so fragmented that it renders the advertising agency business model obsolete: If mass reach cannot be bought anymore, why not just work with publishers directly - or hire specialists from each relevant media segment separately?
To survive and thrive, however, the agencies need to change the ways they go about their business. The technology already exists for the agencies to connect the dots, apply scale and extract the maximum advantages for their clients. It may as well be, as Don Draper would put it, "the greatest advertising opportunity since the invention of cereal."
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All media are vehicles for persuasion and influence; TV power, however, was, until recently, assumed to be bordering on magic. Under a spell - this is how some nostalgic advertisers choose to remember consumers subjected to TV advertising in the time before TiVo. Back then, it seems, only the first Newtonian law - that bodies at rest stay at rest - prevented consumers from dashing, like Harold and Kumar, to a burger joint at the moment its commercial faded.
This nostalgia isn't unjustified… Show more

All media are vehicles for persuasion and influence; TV power, however, was, until recently, assumed to be bordering on magic. Under a spell - this is how some nostalgic advertisers choose to remember consumers subjected to TV advertising in the time before TiVo. Back then, it seems, only the first Newtonian law - that bodies at rest stay at rest - prevented consumers from dashing, like Harold and Kumar, to a burger joint at the moment its commercial faded.
This nostalgia isn't unjustified. TV wields a near-hypnotic hold on the attention of its couch-reclined audiences, thanks to the combination of viewers' relaxed passivity and our universal hard-wired sensitivity to movement and novelty in the immediate environment. Camera-angle changes, cuts, pans, tilts and zooms on a large screen, along with sudden noises, inevitably activate what is called "orienting response," an instinctive visual or auditory reaction to any sudden or novel stimulus. Discovered by Ivan Pavlov in 1927 (yes, he of the dog and the bell), the orienting response involves slowing of the heart and increased blood flow to the brain, with changes in brain wave patterns indicating intense gathering and storing of the information.
Although a single orienting response only lasts seconds, TV continuously generates these responses in its viewers, keeping their eyes glued to the screen. Extensive research also confirms that orienting response time is when human attention capacity is at its highest - the optimal time to internalize the fact that a 15-minute call can save you 15 percent or more on car insurance.
The proliferation of broadband content opened new ways to reach consumers with a video ad. On average, 134 million people watched TV content online every month in the second quarter of this year, according to Nielsen's Three Screen Report.
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Today, there is no shortage of social media measurement companies. Indeed, the raw data is easy to access and process - so easy, in fact, that there are already five different providers dealing exclusively with Twitter metrics. And marketers' increasing curiosity about social networking has given birth to research vendors who focus on monitoring discussion volumes and delivering dashboards centered on mentions of specific issues or brands. These vendors quantify the number of times the brand or… Show more

Today, there is no shortage of social media measurement companies. Indeed, the raw data is easy to access and process - so easy, in fact, that there are already five different providers dealing exclusively with Twitter metrics. And marketers' increasing curiosity about social networking has given birth to research vendors who focus on monitoring discussion volumes and delivering dashboards centered on mentions of specific issues or brands. These vendors quantify the number of times the brand or company is mentioned in blogs, on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter, especially when supplemented with sophisticated sentiment analysis that discerns positive brand mentions from the negative. The rationale here is that positive brand mentions are somewhat like brand advocacy by influentials, and so the goal of any aspiring social marketer is to promote them.

But as volumes of user-generated content grow, it becomes harder to believe that all these users and posters are really opinion leaders. What about those users who do not post their comments on a particular subject? Do we know whether buzz affects them or not - or at least how many of them are out there reading the posts? And what are the business results of this positive - or negative - buzz? Unfortunately, few tracking companies provide information that is comparable to the results coming from other media and relevant to advertisers' overall campaign goals.

So what insights do advertisers need in order to successfully operate in this new environment? Until now, marketing was about producing change by delivering a message to the audience. Today, it is about triggering change through conversation. Knowing what the conversation is about is the prerequisite for an intelligent conversation - and here is where all monitoring and listening platforms may prove helpful.
The real value of social media to advertisers, however, lies in the attitudinal and behavioral changes that happen to network users. Show less

Ads can basically pop up anywhere these days - from the newspaper to the phone to the road to the air to the coffee shop. The variety of innovative advertising formats suggests no pre-set limits for imagination. Not so when it comes to underlying strategies; they remain unwaveringly old school. The industry seems to cling to a convention that there are but two distinctive objectives a campaign can pursue: direct response or branding.
For many clients, digital media still squarely equates to… Show more

Ads can basically pop up anywhere these days - from the newspaper to the phone to the road to the air to the coffee shop. The variety of innovative advertising formats suggests no pre-set limits for imagination. Not so when it comes to underlying strategies; they remain unwaveringly old school. The industry seems to cling to a convention that there are but two distinctive objectives a campaign can pursue: direct response or branding.
For many clients, digital media still squarely equates to "direct." Decades of TV research and mere common sense suggest that if there is a single area where traditional media have an edge on digital, it would be in launching and building brands. You need only compare a 30-second TV spot with a pesky banner ad to get the drift. The former is far more emotionally engaging and thus better suited for branding; the latter gets click-throughs and is thus built for direct response.
The reality is not so black-and-white. Virtually any online ad worth its pixels challenges the traditional distinctions. A flashy pre-roll video ad for a new Infiniti coupe concurrently raises brand awareness, prompts consideration and requires only a few clicks to schedule a test drive. In other words, it elicits a direct response. A Best Buy rich-media expandable unveils a mini-storefront featuring an array of digital cameras that can be purchased right on the spot, all while upholding the retailer's brand for future consideration. The Travelocity ad copy seems unnoticeable on a busy search-results page - and yet most recent studies agree on the fact that text-only ads generate brand awareness just by being there. While advertisers closely monitor direct-response campaigns on behavioral and financial metrics - visits, sign-ups, cost-per-lead, transactions, cost-per-acquisition and roi - measurement of their branding campaigns is often either meaningless or nonexistent. Show less

When you read this article in Media, what exactly are your eyes scanning? Chances are it's not an archetypal bundle of cellulose and ink, but just another Web page on your laptop, PC or mobile device. As are most magazines today, Media is available in both paper and digital incarnations - and, as is the case with other publications, an increasing number of its readers prefer the latter form.
The term "magazine" comes from a French word meaning "storehouse" or "storage." (This explains, if… Show more

When you read this article in Media, what exactly are your eyes scanning? Chances are it's not an archetypal bundle of cellulose and ink, but just another Web page on your laptop, PC or mobile device. As are most magazines today, Media is available in both paper and digital incarnations - and, as is the case with other publications, an increasing number of its readers prefer the latter form.
The term "magazine" comes from a French word meaning "storehouse" or "storage." (This explains, if you were curious, why this word is used to indicate, among other things, the integral part of an M-16 assault rifle.) But the days when magazines were the main repositories of current niche information and entertainment are gone. The Internet has established itself as a primary resource, offering seemingly infinite, up-to-date content across nearly every category of interest, and consumers are taking advantage of the choices they have.
As consumer behavior has shifted, ad dollars have followed. To capture them, traditional magazine brands started to extend their offerings into the online arena. But they did not arrive in an empty arena: Various e-zines and blogs had already been catering to special interests online - and in the past several years, their numbers have skyrocketed. Portals like Yahoo, AOL and MSN also offer constantly updated content on a variety of subjects previously exclusive to magazine titles. Moreover, on the Internet, magazine brands have to compete for consumer attention with other traditional media channels' digital extensions, just like National Geographic online has to compete with Discovery Channel.
The rise of digital even prompted some pundits to predict the quick vanishing of print media altogether. They may be not so far from the truth in the case of daily newspapers: Unable to compete with the lightning-fast pace of their online competition, newspapers have, in recent years, seen their readership numbers and advertising revenues go into a tailspin. Show less

Back when TV was young, the visionary communications theorist Marshall McLuhan noted: "When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backwards into the future."
For an advertiser in today's fragmented media landscape, reach and frequency are such objects; they have a nostalgic value, being the traditional metrics of audience exposure to the… Show more

Back when TV was young, the visionary communications theorist Marshall McLuhan noted: "When faced with a totally new situation, we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past. We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backwards into the future."
For an advertiser in today's fragmented media landscape, reach and frequency are such objects; they have a nostalgic value, being the traditional metrics of audience exposure to the advertising. For the past five decades, these metrics and their derivatives, the ratings points, served as media's gold standard. They were the common denominators for evaluating campaign performance across different media channels and schedules. They directed billions of dollars in advertising spending.

As marketing plans started to include online placements, advertisers sought a similar measurement. Once comScore and Nielsen came up with digital R/F estimating tools to show what audiences new media placements bring to the table, the amount of online spending increased exponentially. With a familiar object now appearing in their rearview mirrors, advertisers could start their march into the future.

But now, years later, many of us are still facing backward, holding on to reach and frequency, totems of the television age. Advertisers using digital cannot rely on reach and frequency alone to project the value of digital advertising relative to other communication channels. By doing so, they restrict their ability to capture the whole picture of exposure to online advertising - and by and large, they can only understand a fraction of what happens after an ad appears online.

Estimating online media reach turned out to be quite different from doing so for television or radio campaigns. Unlike with TV programs, simply knowing the site's audience numbers at the time when the ads are running is not enough to project the reach of online advertising.

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The role played by the perceived utility (or Pragmatic Value) of a Web site that is focused on product advertising and persuasive appeals in producing the desired purchase behavior has produced contradictory results in prior research. In some studies Pragmatic Value has been linked directly to purchase intention, while in other studies it has operated only indirectly via the attitude change path predicted by conventional advertising hierarchy of effects theory. In this paper a number of… Show more

The role played by the perceived utility (or Pragmatic Value) of a Web site that is focused on product advertising and persuasive appeals in producing the desired purchase behavior has produced contradictory results in prior research. In some studies Pragmatic Value has been linked directly to purchase intention, while in other studies it has operated only indirectly via the attitude change path predicted by conventional advertising hierarchy of effects theory. In this paper a number of possible confounding variables that may have produced these different conclusions are identified and included in an overall theoretical structural model which includes both direct and indirect paths of influence of Pragmatic Value on purchase intention. This model provides the critical tests to resolve the discrepant findings. Results of a Web experiment with 119 subjects indicated that the conventional hierarchy of effects that operates via attitudes held only for subjects who considered the product advertised on the site to be uninvolving. In a group of high involvement subjects, Pragmatic Value influenced the ultimate purchase intention by both a direct path and by an indirect path operating through the conventional attitudinal hierarchy variables. The results indicate a need to extend the conventional advertising hierarchy of effects to include Pragmatic Value when analyzing Web sites that serve as extended advertisements. Show less

Few marketing theories have enjoyed such long-lived consensus as the existence of "opinion leaders." Since the glorious days of radio, marketers have gone to great lengths to reach a small number of these disproportionately influential people in the hope that they'll actively absorb and interpret their media messages for the lower-end media users.
It started back in 1940s, when early mass media researchers Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld discovered that personal contacts and word-of-mouth… Show more

Few marketing theories have enjoyed such long-lived consensus as the existence of "opinion leaders." Since the glorious days of radio, marketers have gone to great lengths to reach a small number of these disproportionately influential people in the hope that they'll actively absorb and interpret their media messages for the lower-end media users.
It started back in 1940s, when early mass media researchers Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld discovered that personal contacts and word-of-mouth proliferates marketing messages more effectively than newspapers and radio. Although more complex models of information propagation emerged in the following decades, the "two-step flow" model continued to survive almost entirely intact. According to its most popular application, the Roper Influentials model developed by Ed Keller and Jon Berry, this elite 10 percent of the population serves as the conduits of new information, trends, ideas and purchase preferences to the other 90 percent.
It seems the rules of admittance to the exclusive Influencers' Club have radically relaxed. Social media advances have all but erased the obstacles to becoming an information disseminator. A typical teenager with a blog can ostensibly amass and disseminate more content about brands and, potentially, influence more consumers in their purchase decisions, than the most connected and respected opinion leader of 1970s. Is he an Influential, then? Does the 1-to-9 ratio still hold?
Increased complexity in the media landscape led Columbia University professor Duncan Watts to challenge the two-step model with computer simulations. In 2007 he concluded that it's no longer feasible that influence is driven by the elite of the highly-connected few. Recent findings by Ted Smith, a research fellow at CNET Networks, also suggest that most people are moderately connected.
If everyone is an opinion leader, there are no opinion leaders to target exclusively. Show less

Online advertising, they say, is a marriage of art and science. But if this is true, it certainly was a wedding of the shotgun variety. Since the days of John Wanamaker, corporations lived with the hope that at least 50 percent of their advertising was not wasted. Flash forward to 2000 and the waste ratio of online advertising looked much worse, with 98 percent of the target audience refraining from clicking on campaign ads.
Clients did the math and concluded that online consumers were… Show more

Online advertising, they say, is a marriage of art and science. But if this is true, it certainly was a wedding of the shotgun variety. Since the days of John Wanamaker, corporations lived with the hope that at least 50 percent of their advertising was not wasted. Flash forward to 2000 and the waste ratio of online advertising looked much worse, with 98 percent of the target audience refraining from clicking on campaign ads.
Clients did the math and concluded that online consumers were advertising-blind, which pushed the arty agency folks to embrace hard science as a means to prove that online advertising does, in fact, move the needle. As with any branch of science, the most powerful tool to determine the truth is the experiment. This usually brings to mind white-coated scientists in a lab mixing ominously glowing substances at their own risk. While white coats are optional in advertising research, advertisers have practiced controlled lab experiments for several decades. For example, they randomly separated subjects into test and control groups, showed them different versions of an ad and observed their reactions. This is how we learned that subliminal advertising does not work.
Advertisers used to shy away from two other types of experiments: 1) field experiments that create controlled environments in the real world; and 2) quasi-experiments (also known as natural experiments), which require no intervention but rely on elaborate observations. The former were considered too difficult to perform, the latter often inapplicable, due to a lack of good data. Show less

This research focuses on central advertising industry challenge: marketing to empowered consumers who also act as content editors and creators, use a plethora of different media sources to gather information about brands, and go to great lengths to share and disseminate this information through social networks. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to further marketing practitioners’ understanding of their changing audiences and will help them to use consumers’ category involvement… Show more

This research focuses on central advertising industry challenge: marketing to empowered consumers who also act as content editors and creators, use a plethora of different media sources to gather information about brands, and go to great lengths to share and disseminate this information through social networks. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to further marketing practitioners’ understanding of their changing audiences and will help them to use consumers’ category involvement for carrying brand interactions strategically from one media channel to the next.

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Global warming and consumers warming up to a brand or product: While it might not be obvious at first glance, there are certainly parallels between the two. First, both climate changes and consumers' responses to advertising are significantly more measurable today than in the past. And, second, in both areas new patterns, emerging from newly acquired data, routinely challenge our convenient ways of thinking and render our customary methods of going about our business… Show more

Global warming and consumers warming up to a brand or product: While it might not be obvious at first glance, there are certainly parallels between the two. First, both climate changes and consumers' responses to advertising are significantly more measurable today than in the past. And, second, in both areas new patterns, emerging from newly acquired data, routinely challenge our convenient ways of thinking and render our customary methods of going about our business inadequate.

Traditionally, the industry viewed advertising effects as a one-way street: advertiser launches a campaign, consumer responds to its ads -- and advertising was attributed as the factor driving consumer attitudes and behaviors. This was a convenience approach, as in many cases we only knew how to quantify the beginning of the process (reach and frequency of exposure) and the end of it (sales). The industry only occasionally considered effectiveness measures, such as branding, that happen in between.

Search and consumer-generated media introduced so much complexity that predicting advertising effects indeed became similar to predicting climate change. In digital ecosystems, just like in the atmosphere, feedback loops amplify the ways a consumer warms up or cools off to a brand. For example, both traditional and digital media campaigns generate online word-of-mouth. That buzz, however, remains after the campaign is over, keeps on reappearing in search results, and acts like a perpetual media placement in itself, continuing to influence consumer behaviors and their responses to consequent campaigns.

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Compares traditional print advertising with interactive on-line (Web-based) advertising, and explores the assumptions that the audience effect for the first is passive and for the second it is active. Asks how far transactionality changes audience response and acts as a predictor of purchase intentions. Develops four models of cause-effect relationships between advertising, attitudes, the pragmatic value of the ads (i.e. its purposive information effect), and offer acceptance behaviour. Argues… Show more

Compares traditional print advertising with interactive on-line (Web-based) advertising, and explores the assumptions that the audience effect for the first is passive and for the second it is active. Asks how far transactionality changes audience response and acts as a predictor of purchase intentions. Develops four models of cause-effect relationships between advertising, attitudes, the pragmatic value of the ads (i.e. its purposive information effect), and offer acceptance behaviour. Argues that online mediators of promotional ads benefit from analysing processes in this way. Discusses an experimental research design carried out with students at a US university, exposed to a range of fictional retail ads, some with embedded interactive online features, and measures findings in terms of behaviour, attitudes, and perceptions of pragmatic value. Concludes that structure and sequencing of cause-effect relationships is different for an interactive medium with an active audience (representing this with a fifth, a posteriori, model), that pragmatic value is a reliable predictor of purchase intention, that pragmatic value effects seem independent from attitudes, and that Web-based features increase promotional offer acceptance behaviour. Accepts theoretical basis of the research so far. Show less

This paper focuses on how individuals create their own exposure experience from the content provided by an online advertiser within an interactive medium. An experimental design was employed to examine the effects of pre-existing task and commercialism of online material on people's choice of online content.
The results of logistic regression suggest that traditional models of advertising effects, with their emphasis on attitudes as the predictors of selective exposure are inadequate for… Show more

This paper focuses on how individuals create their own exposure experience from the content provided by an online advertiser within an interactive medium. An experimental design was employed to examine the effects of pre-existing task and commercialism of online material on people's choice of online content.
The results of logistic regression suggest that traditional models of advertising effects, with their emphasis on attitudes as the predictors of selective exposure are inadequate for understanding exposure to the media that demand constant, active evaluations of messages rather than passive reception. Pragmatic value was the only variable that consistently predicted the probability of continued voluntary exposure to the site by the viewer.
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This dissertation focuses on a central research problem: how individuals create their own exposure experience from the content provided by an online advertiser within an interactive medium and what are the outcomes of this free exposure. An experimental design was employed to examine the effects of pre-existing task, selectivity of content, and commercialism of online material on people's online behavior, attitudes, and pragmatic evaluations of the content and behavioral intentions. ^ The… Show more

This dissertation focuses on a central research problem: how individuals create their own exposure experience from the content provided by an online advertiser within an interactive medium and what are the outcomes of this free exposure. An experimental design was employed to examine the effects of pre-existing task, selectivity of content, and commercialism of online material on people's online behavior, attitudes, and pragmatic evaluations of the content and behavioral intentions. ^ The results of path analysis suggest that traditional models of advertising effects, with their emphasis on attitudes as the mediators of behavioral change, are inadequate for understanding online advertising processes in media that demand constant, active evaluations of messages rather than passive reception. Contrary to previous findings on traditional media, the pragmatic value of advertising and online behavior itself emerged as strong predictors of behavioral (purchase) intentions, independently of attitudinal variables. Show less